[Vwdiesel] Vwdiesel Digest, Vol 120, Issue 6 gages

[stan finch]

Sad to read about the tdi engine.  I had a family member lock up a 1.6td motor and told me they ignored the flashing coolant light to just get up over the hill before pulling over to look at it :(  That was a coolant hose burst and coolant dump.  I was able to limp that home by refilling water every mile, it just seemed to take out the head gasket, no head warpage.

That inspired me to look for gages like you and auber instruments sells some electronic gages and senders that you can program to trigger an alarm you set.  Its light will illuminate and also trigger voltage out on a port.  You do have to have a gage for each sender you want to monitor in real time but their stuff seems to be quality thus far.  They have all sorts for egt, water/oil temps, pressure,etc.

I used an aircraft buzzer for mine which is annoying and it makes you want to turn the car off when sounded since its pointed right at the driver :)

I drive 1.6 engines now so I know how they run and sound and can detect when they are missing, timing being off, etc.  I also have monitored typical temps/pressures on a healthy motor so I might just spot something going on.

Anything can fail of course but I like them because I don't see how you will catch something on old stock gages.  Even newer cars I have driven have real crappy dinger alarms.

Also on the 85 jetta I have they started with the low coolant light in the dash.  This specific car has been daily driven like crazy and was my first old vw diesel I got about 5 years ago and I really like that circuit they made.  Maybe its just been good luck but I can only recall a handfull of times where I would say it went crazy and started blinking when there was fluid in the reservoir.  Better safe than sorry so I would always check it.  I have not looked into retrofitting this to another chasis with a different cluster but I have seen all sorts of float devices on ebay that you could try and fit somewhere inline and hook up via relays, etc. to a buzzer in the same manner.  I plan on doing this as well because some times I have noticed with coolant dumping, air pockets and whether the thermostat is open things can happen to effect the true temps.  So this would be nice in case a hose breaks.